Today, with the start of terrestrial digital broadcasting services, the television system is shifting from SDTV to the finer HDTV. SDTV stands for Standard Definition Television, and HDTV stands for High Definition Television. In addition, opportunities to work with HD video at home are increasing for reasons such as inexpensive general-purpose HD (High Definition) cameras becoming commercially available. There is a need to store the content of digital broadcasting and video taken by HD cameras in a storage device at home to be shared among family members and watch the content and HD video on each member's PC (Personal Computer) at the desired times. Therefore, a network is often established at home for accessing the storage device containing the content and HD video from each member's PC.
For the network at home (home network), a wired LAN (Local Area Network) such as Ethernet (R) or a wireless LAN defined by IEEE 802.11x is currently used. Typically, using a wireless LAN to configure the home network is preferably desired, because the wired LAN requires efforts to place cables inside the house.
However, since a wireless LAN has a transmission bandwidth not as wide as that of the wired LAN, it frequently causes transmission errors when HD video is transmitted, due to the occurrence of delays and the interference of radio waves under the influence of other traffic. These transmission errors are inherently caused and cannot be prevented, so that packets lost by the transmission errors are typically retransmitted. However, for content requiring a wide transmission bandwidth and real-timeness, such as HD video, retransmission is not completed by the time for video display. As a result, seamless video cannot be displayed.
One method for suppressing the occurrence of the transmission errors is to increase the transmission power (for example, Patent Documents: US Publication Nos. and 2002-003787 corresponding to Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-95065).
However, increasing the transmission power poses problems such as interfering with other wireless communications within the same frequency.